Katherine Mansfield

Jun22

‘I am a writer first’*: Sally Minogue looks at the work and the life of Katherine Mansfield.

When I went along to the university library to flesh
out my knowledge of Katherine Mansfield, I was surprised at the number of
biographies available there about her.Five at least since the 1970s, one of which is a revision and extension by
Anthony Alpers of his earlier biography ; and add to that the Collected Letters in 4 volumes and The Poems, both under the definitive
Oxford imprint; the Critical Writings
from Macmillan; and the Notebooks
edited by Margaret Scott, a key scholar of Mansfield and of the period. All of
this scholarship comes in the wake of the exhaustive publishing of Mansfield’s
work, and a version of her life, soon after her death, by her husband John
Middleton Murry.

To put it bluntly, the scholarly and especially the
biographical paraphernalia surrounding Katherine Mansfield far outweighs the
presence of her fiction in the canon and the recognition of her work by the
general public. Murry first kept her work alive, and not only because he was
Mansfield’s husband but because he believed in her. The excrescence of critical
and biographical interest from the 1970s onwards was driven by the rise in feminism
and feminist criticism. Mansfield was a clear case of a woman writer who should
be foregrounded as playing a key role in the formation of modernism, alongside
her close friend D. H. Lawrence. Her relationship with Virginia Woolf, personal
and professional, also placed her at the heart of modernism. But the fact that
even now I am contextualising her in terms of these two modernist giants
reflects the fact that she has always been seen as lesser than them. How far is
that a fair judgement?

Here we must invoke the fact that Mansfield came from
New Zealand, in her time a distant outpost of the British Empire; England was
still the mother country, towards which writers gravitated. Only belatedly have
we come to appreciate the particular experience and attendant voice that might
have sprung from that experience. With the hindsight of post-colonial
criticism, we can understand the outsiderish-ness of Mansfield’s vision, which
gives her work an idiosyncratic tone and a take on consciousness which is entirely
informed by her sense of elsewhere. If we add in to this Mansfield’s sexual
experimentations, whether these were uncertainties or, as they might now be interpreted,
enriching awarenesses of possible identities, we see how her personal life
might have been extraordinarily difficult, but at the same time her writing
life open and original, both informed by her utter determination not to follow
the prescribed path. And what difficult people and cultures she had to deal
with! Ottoline Morrell and Virginia Woolf, both culturally snobbish in their
different ways and catty to boot, never mind the whole Bloomsbury set-up. As
Angela Smith attests in her Katherine
Mansfield: A Literary Life, Woolf, Morrell and Rupert Brooke were all
unpleasantly sneering about her. Here is Woolf: ‘The more she is praised, the
more I am convinced she is bad. ... She touches the spot too universally for
that spot to be of the bluest blood.’ The reference to blood is telling; Morrell
notes that she is ‘Japanese in appearance, also I should have said in mind –
she had their delicate, exotic vulgarity and sensitively showy bad taste.’
What??! Then, as if Woolf’s and Morrell’s not very carefully hidden racism and
disparagement of all things colonial were not enough, she had to contend with an
attempt at communal living with Lawrence and Frieda, who couldn’t even live
communally with each other.

But enough of the life, even if it did greatly
influence both Mansfield’s work and the way it has been perceived. What should
we take from that work? First of all,
Mansfield was immensely prolific; she published her first writings at 19, and
her first short story collection, In a
German Pension, at 23. She continued writing right up to her death at the
age of 35, and indeed the stories written in 1921 when she was having treatment
for the tuberculosis that would kill her come back to her great early
preoccupations from the consummate ‘Prelude’ of 1918. ‘At the Bay’ and ‘The
Garden Party’, written under the duress of her illness (published in the 1921
collection The Garden-Party and Other
Stories) complete a brilliant triumvirate of New Zealand stories. These are
not confined to their colonial setting but rather make use of it in a
fascinating way to explore precisely the modernist preoccupations with
consciousness which occupied Lawrence and Woolf.

Mansfield’s great strength is in recognising the
half-hidden states of consciousness, particularly those of women, which the
individuals themselves struggle to recognise or articulate, but which they
experience powerfully. Sometimes these are states of bliss, but sometimes too,
as in the story ‘Bliss’, that rhapsodic awareness is belied by the actuality of
the crude lived life. Nonetheless, and even in that apparently ironically named
story, Mansfield presents us with the state of mind as it is. It is not belied
by what comes after. Yet at the same time there is always an underside in
Mansfield’s stories. It is not so much that nothing is as it appears; rather,
it is as it appears and is experienced, but not long after something else can
come along to undermine or question what has gone before. This can come from
within or without. Sometimes it happens alongside.

In Mansfield’s best stories, life shifts, sometimes
for and within a moment, sometimes for good. Saying ‘for good’, I mean of
course – forever. But the shift is, also, for good, in the sense that it brings
some insight or understanding, even an epiphany in the Joycean sense. And as
that happens, something shifts for the reader too. In true modernist tradition,
Mansfield keeps the reader onside. These moments of truth are perhaps
inevitably and inherently melancholy, because they give an insight into the
tears of things. But at their most successful they offer that insight as a
means to make life richer, even if the richness of understanding is underpinned
by an awareness of life’s sadness. Thus the ending of ‘At the Bay’, where the
unmarried sister Beryl so desires something other than her current life can
give her, and has fantasies of what that might be; but when presented with the
actuality of Harry Kember, ‘Beryl was strong. She slipped, ducked, wrenched
free.’ (196) Beryl buys her independence
by her strength, physical and moral; but there remains a part of her that would
have, simply, wanted to succumb. One does not belie the other.

In this way Mansfield is of but also in advance of her
time. Her concentration on female experience and consciousness is steadfast,
and here she is occupying the same ground as Woolf. But perhaps the short story
form allows her small, concentrated explorations and bursts of understanding to
be more powerful than if more fully explored in the novel form. Women can be
both subjugated and distressed, the victims of their own lack of confidence or
knowledge (as in ‘The Little Governess’ or ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’).
But they can also be central and significant, as in ‘An Indiscreet Journey’,
where the woman takes the initiative to travel to the Front during the First
World War (a sort of inverse version of ‘The Little Governess’). In ‘Prelude’
and ‘At the Bay’, the married women are undoubtedly at the centre of things,
their agency derived precisely from their lack of activity in the world; the
men with their worldly lives and their self-importance are accordingly,
unexpectedly, uncentred. Mansfield is extremely good on marriage, observing it
again with that sceptical, outsider eye, yet also aware of the centrality and
power it can have in the social world, whilst remaining precarious and
unpredictable in its internal workings. Mansfield was twice married, but it was
her long-time friend Ida Baker whom she called ‘wife’ at the end of her life,
and this relationship, although it is generally thought not to be sexual, seems
to have answered to something in her, perhaps because Ida allowed her full
dominance.

A last word for stories of Mansfield’s that have been
little noticed, those about the New Zealand outback. ‘Millie’, ‘The Woman at
the Store’ and ‘Ole Underwood’ explore a world diametrically opposed to that of
‘The Garden-Party’ and ‘Prelude’. Yet they are of the same geography. How did
Mansfield know this world? We discover only by the most roundabout of mentions
that the narrator of ‘The Woman at the Store’ is a woman. She is one of the
riders ranging the outback, and she it is who describes the eponymous ‘woman at
the store’, one unusual woman describing another. The detail of these stories
gives us a sense of a desolate, isolated and bifurcated life; the interiors of
the makeshift dwellings are furnished with packing case dressing-tables and
papered with pages from English periodicals featuring Queen Victoria’s Jubilee.
Nothing could be further from the European settings of so many of Mansfield’s
stories, or indeed from her affluent suburban New Zealand settings. But the
sense of anomie is the same. Not for nothing did Woolf eventually admit: ‘I was
jealous of her writing – the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ Fair
revenge for Mansfield. But even better would have been the fact that Woolf
surely would have shared Mansfield’s view of what mattered most: ‘More even
than talking or laughing or being happy I want to write.’

*Letter to her husband John Middleton Murry, December
12th 1920, in the midst of an epistolary quarrel about Murry’s
liking for – and possible affair with – another woman, also a writer. He made
the mistake of sending her stories to Katherine for her opinion. Mansfield drew
herself up, as it were, against these peccadilloes, and also pulled rank,
announcing ‘I am a writer first’. My
quotation at the end of the blog is from the same letter.